DCU Ryan Academy Propeller Venture Accelerator, which is also a Techstars Network member, is inviting the most promising tech self-starters with bright ideas to apply for the last remaining seats on its upcoming programme that aims to spin out new firms. Applications close tomorrow (2 November).

This accelerator at DCU Ryan Academy, which is ranked seventh in Europe, has already received applications from all over the world, including China, India, USA, Israel, Iran and Europe, according to Terence Bowden, Venture manager at DCU Ryan Academy.

In January, the accepted companies will move into the office space at DCU, while they will also get an attractive package to help get their companies off the ground, including financial aid and mentoring from experienced entrepreneurs, said Bowden today.

Imagine being able to work on your business at various locations across the U.S., collaborate with technologists and scientists and get startup funding in half the time. Sounds like a kick-ass accelerator program right?

Though the gang from TechStars might offer similar enticements, the U.S. government is behind this souped-up accelerator program. Last week President Barack Obama dispatched two Presidential memorandums -- which are like executive orders in which federal agencies must abide -- aimed at easing entrepreneurs’ access business information and advice, as well as fostering innovation and job creation by improving public/private connections.

For the third quarter of 2011, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation leavened its otherwise morose quarterly survey of economics bloggers (PDF) with something new: a haiku contest. The 63 academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists who participated in the survey, including myself, were asked to describe the state of the economy in the form of a haiku, the classical Japanese poetry form consisting of three lines in five, seven, and five syllables. More than 500 public readers voted on the compositions, which were published last week by The Economist.

I didn’t win, perhaps because my poem didn’t hew to the required number of syllables—but more likely because I just was trying too hard to be clever:

Bizdom U, the Detroit incubator backed by Dan Gilbert, will now be nurturing even more local entrepreneurs thanks to a change in its business model.

Starting with the fall session, which began on October 17, Bizdom switched to a model similar to that of TechStars or Y Combinator: After undergoing a rigorous screening, 30 startups will each receive $10,000 in seed money, plus $4,500 per founder, in exchange for an 8 percent equity stake and a promise to locate their business in Detroit. While at Bizdom, the entrepreneurs will spend three months in the collaborative Launch Lab, where they’ll receive training in marketing, sales, and business, as well as intenstive coaching and feedback from serial entrepreneurs and other business experts. At the end of the Launch Labs program, entrepreneurs will be put in a room with multiple investors, where they will have the opportunity to pitch for the necessary funding to take their business to the next level.

Every year I write about the projects and trends which keep me up at night. Here’s my list for FY12:

1. Workforce recruitment/retention – $27 billion in stimulus funds from HITECH have increased demand for experienced IT staff to implement and support electronic health records. In many ways, it’s a mini “dot com” boom for healthcare IT experts. This makes recruiting and retaining qualified staff even harder. Tomorrow, I’m meeting with a consulting team to formulate an FY12 workforce strategy.

LAWRENCE – A biorefining initiative under way at the University of Kansas holds tremendous economic promise for rural Kansas, university and industry leaders told the Kansas Bioscience Authority today.

Bala Subramaniam, director of KU’s Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis, outlined how Kansas could become a leader in what promises to be a multibillion dollar biobased chemical industry.

Chemicals from grasses and after-harvest throwaways would be significantly more valuable than biofuels such as ethanol. Since biorefineries need to be located near sources of raw materials, this would create jobs near farms and in small towns across Kansas.

At first blush, the idea of using the iPad for educational purposes seems like a no-brainer. Its capacity to load books is practically unlimited, it opens up new, immersive possibilities with multimedia, and it connects to that infinite bucket of knowledge called the Internet.

Even at this early stage in the tablet game, there are early signs that schools are embracing tablets like the iPad. The latest is a survey showing that IT professionals expect tablets to outnumber desktop machines in schools within the next five years.

Lankasana, a 23-year-old Maasai warrior, sports long, ochre-stained, braided hair extensions and carries a bow and arrow, a short sword and a steel-tipped spear. He spends his days raiding neighboring villages and protecting his own tribe from attacks by wild animals. For fun, he wrestles fellow tribesmen and practices his aim by tossing spears at tree trunks. Lankasana once killed a lion armed with only a sword, but not before the lion clawed his shoulders, leaving huge scars.

All too often, Silicon Valley is considered the premier place to launch and grow a technology-based company.  And, no doubt, the Valley has certainly earned its reputation as a hotbed for innovation, entrepreneurship and venture capital. One can’t deny the long list of successes including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Intel, Oracle and Google, to name only a few. But look around today and you’ll note many technology companies, especially startups, experiencing success outside of the Valley.

Thriving startups are sprouting up across the United States in cities like Dallas, Chicago, Miami and Atlanta, (which is home to my company, Vitrue). These cities are providing startups with an environment for success and producing additional benefits along the way. How exactly? And why does it matter? A few thoughts come to mind…

At the GreenBiz Innovation Forum, held in San Francisco the 11th till the 13th of October, Dayna Baumeister, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild — which is now rebranding as Biomimicry 3.8, gave a presentation on biomimicry.

Baumeister summed up the most important skill to exploring biomimicry: “Quieting the cleverness and getting back into our childlike minds.” In short, asking the questions about how little things can work together on big problems is the core of biomimicry — and a fundamental feature of innovation.

As the U.S. winds down military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and troops come home, many are eager to start work in the civilian sector. But it's been tough: The federal government reports the unemployment rate for young veterans has hovered around 30 percent this year.

Faced with this grim statistic, a new group based in Milwaukee, Wis., called VETransfer is helping veterans start their own businesses. It aims to connect veteran entrepreneurs to financing and equipping them with the resources and knowledge to get their venture off the ground.

As a teenager, I was delighted to discover on the map of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth the name of the city where I was born. Not the same town, of course, but another, fantastical place with the same name. Nevertheless, the map gave me options. I could be a native of Bree, a small, unremarkable town in northeastern Belgium. Or I could hail from that other Bree, equally small and unremarkable, but at least located in a world brimming with magic, danger and adventure — not to mention some spectacular scenery. In contrast, my home province of Limburg, in Belgium’s northeast, is generally flat, and on the whole bereft of elves, orcs, hobbits and wizards. So I spent many hours exploring Tolkien’s world, dreaming up adventures of my own in the far corners of that map.

My perusal of this cartographic portal to another reality is definitely one of the reasons for my abiding interest in curious cartography, which I’ve been exploring for some time now on my blog Strange Maps.

This interview with Lynn Blodgett, president and C.E.O. of ACS, a Xerox company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What were some early lessons for you?

A. I come from a family of nine kids — six boys and three girls. Because it was a large family, we didn’t have a lot. One of the things that we did every Christmas was that my parents would say we had to earn our Christmas money. And so they were the venture capitalists.  They’d give us $5, and then we would go buy wholesale wrapping paper and take orders and resell them and turn that $5 into $25.

It was a great thing, because you learned about customers, learned about keeping your word, getting the orders delivered on time.

Q. What about your first kind of formal management role?

A. We worked for my parents, and I did kind of supervisory things there, and then worked for the company that bought my parents’ business and actually ended up running that business.

Annual performance reviews: you either love ‘em or hate ‘em. Some companies get the formula right, developing a constructive review process that helps employees grow — to these employers, we say, “kudos.”

On the other side of the coin, though, there are many companies that simply miss the mark, creating repetitive review processes that seem to only serve as time-wasting disciplinary tools.

In the past decade, we’ve seen performance reviews move to the online space, making it easier for employees and employers to complete and share them.

Every parent wants their child to be smart, and it is commonly believed that there is an association between music and cognitive ability.

Classical music, and Mozart in particular, have been thought to improve memory and increase intelligence, due to studies such as one originally published in the journal Nature in 1993. Researchers at the University of California at Irvine found a temporary enhancement in spatial-temporal reasoning after students in their study listened to Mozart. These results were widely reported, widely misconstrued, and came to be known as "The Mozart Effect." According to neuroscientist Sam Wang, the idea that passively listening to Mozart makes you smarter was "taken to an extreme where pregnant women put speakers on their bellies and think that this is somehow good for a baby's development."

There was a girl at a party, Ona, who then started telling me how she met her current boyfriend. She just simply told him she liked him. I was insanely jealous right then of this guy. Here was this beautiful, hysterically funny girl who told a guy she liked him and now he was having regular sex with her.

That doesn’t happen, right? It never happened to me. I sat there nodding, not being able to say anything but thinking, what if she said, “I like you” to me right then. I would’ve been happy. Instead, I got depressed and went to sit on the stairs.

Facing the nation’s worst record of job creation, Democrats and Republicans in Connecticut last week tried something drastic: cooperation. In a one-day special session, they passed virtually unanimously a $626 million economic development package developed over six weeks of negotiations.

The state has had no net gain in employment in the last 22 years. At a time of political warfare in Washington and elsewhere and gridlock over President Barack Obama’s jobs bill, members of both parties took a rare collective victory lap after the passage of the jobs bill, which Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed Thursday.

“How often do you see this happening in Washington?” Malloy, a Democrat elected last year, said in a statement after the legislation passed Wednesday night. “Putting people back to work and making Connecticut more business-friendly aren’t goals owned by any one party, and they aren’t owned by any one branch of government.”

Do you have a great business or business idea?

That, with an infusion of millions of dollars could become a huge success story?

If so, you should be talking with venture capitalists or VCs. As you probably know, VCs are the folks with the big checkbooks. Who have funded numerous successful companies like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter, Federal Express, and more.

So, how can you meet a venture capitalist?

Well, the best way to meet a VC is to be introduced to them. Perhaps you have a consultant that knows a VC. Or a lawyer that knows a VC. Or a Board Member that knows one. Etc.

But, even if you are extremely well connected, it's virtually impossible to have a connection to every VC you want to meet.

Like many industries, private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) activity have suffered heavily from the global financial crisis, after peaking in 2007. PE has shown signs of a turnaround but the investments you see today are mainly from “dry powder” that needs to be spent. The VC sector, on the other hand, continues to face significant challenges as GFC-affected investors look elsewhere in quest of liquidity and stable returns. Of 30 VC firms operating in Australia, just 10 make new investments.

In the challenging environment, the life sciences sector has been a sole bright spot. Research investment in the life sciences continues to grow, and Australian VCs have supported many world-class companies including Cochlear, Resmed, Pharmaxis, Neuromonics, CathRx, Verva Pharmaceuticals and Chemgenex.

Three years ago, research firm Forrester said "Windows is the only desktop you need support."

Not any more.

In a report released yesterday, analyst David Johnson recommended that IT departments should formally support Macs as well because the best employees prefer them and are bringing them to work anyway.